A Mediation Strategy for Communication Between an Internal Chat System and an Open Source Chat System

Instant messaging applications have been increasingly used in the educational context as they are easily available and thus afford a means to communicate and share resources. Erog, a common behavior that is observed during team project engagements, is the usage of these platforms for most of a team’s discussions, compared to an available internal chat system. This behavior presents a new set of challenges, as these uncaught discussions that are external to a learning platform can reveal more information about the respective learners and teams. Thus, the unavailability of the interaction data reduces insights into the dynamics of a team’s collaboration and how they came about the solutions they present for respective projects. To this end, we have developed and implemented a mediation strategy between SQLValidator (an online learning system) and an open chat system, Telegram, using APIs and Webhooks that facilitate the fetching of Telegram group messages into and from SQLValidator. To assess the effectiveness of our strategy, we compared our system with closely related implementations. Results show that using native APIs and Webhooks is the most reliable, safe, and secure strategy compared to other strategies.